Large organizations, such as corporations, universities, etc., may typically be hierarchically divided into many organizational units. For example, there may be one top-level executive, or a top-level management group, any number of intermediate managers or sub-managers, likely constituting a number of different management tiers within the hierarchy, and then individual workers, students, etc. The organization as a whole, or a subset of the organization, may have a particular goal, towards which it is working. To reach the goal, there may be any number of projects and/or tasks which may need to be completed. It is highly likely that these tasks may be divided up among different units of the organization.
For example, the top-level executive of an organization may stipulate a general goal of providing graphical reporting on the performance of the organization's products. Various intermediate managers may be assigned different projects, all directed towards reaching the general goal. The intermediate managers may assign individual workers specific tasks related to one aspect of the general goal, such as plotting of performance results. It may be the case that the individual workers are not aware of the context of their assigned task.
Due do the multiple layers of the organizational hierarchy, it is possible that in developing specific tasks from the general goal, multiple different individuals will perform duplicate work. As the individuals may be part of different organizational units, have different direct and/or intermediate managers, work in different locations, etc., they may not be aware of the redundancy of their work. As the size of the organization and/or the complexity of the general goals and specific tasks increases, detection of the duplication becomes more difficult. Failure to detect and remedy the duplication of work may result in increased costs as well as the waste of other organizational resources.